How can we improve the Windows platform?

XNA 5

Please continue to work on XNA. It's a great way for indie game developers like myself to make games and give them to the world. XNA gave us the ability to put our games, easily, on the most popular platforms, and to just dump XNA would be therefor heartbreaking... I implore you to keep working on XNA so we C# developers can still make amazing games!

Honestly, though, if Microsoft wants to get their phones going, providing XNA or a suitable replacement for it would likely mean a lot of indie game developers would be able to extend their game readily to Windows smart phones. Having more apps means being more competitive against Android and iPhone. It's the best way to solve the chicken and egg problem that you have of nobody buys the phones because there aren't many apps for it, and no app developers build for Windows Phone because few people own them.

Although MonoGame is a viable technology, we are relying on a third-party, non-full time team of distributed developers to mantain and improve this stop-gap solution. At the very least Microsoft should offer some financial or technical support for this dedicated 'team' so that they have some other motivation other than self-interest to continue to improve and maintain it.

Microsoft you really want to convicne us that you are interested in supporting Indie game development, you would have continued the support to the XNA.

As it is Xamarin are showing more confidence in .NET technogoly than Microsoft, and MonoGame is providing all us XNA developers that since Microsoft gave up on XNA, we should port all our XNA Games over to Android and iOS.

Windows Phone Team, we don't (at least I don't) expect you to take all of the load of XNA 5 on yourselves with this request. We know in the past that there has been an XNA team that has done the bulk of this work, but it would appear they don't exactly exist anymore. Because they're gone, we are petitioning you guys, as well as other people (like the Visual Studio team) who would have a vested interest in making this happen, so that you have ammunition when petitioning the higher-ups within the company. For Windows Phone, your biggest challenge in gaining market share (which you desperately need) is in getting more apps. A system like XNA was the easiest way for indie game developers to build things that worked everywhere, including Windows smart phones.

Even in the event that you guys don't feel like you can tackle this by yourselves, I would hope that you'd allow it to stay open for a while and collect votes. I think we, the indie game development community can help convince you (and the higher-ups that you'd need to convince) with the raw number of votes that this is something you should pursue. Like Tim said, it's already the hottest item on here. Plus, this same suggestion has over 9000 votes on the Visual Studio User Voice page already.

maybe XNA is deprecated, but it's rude to force indie developers change to C++, they have already too much problems to solve rather than read a complex grammar. i guess there is going to be a renamed upgrade version of xna, isnt it?